Good news, ye of the Twitter Mailbag faithful. Soon you’ll have more than the promise of a brief bump in Twitter followers to compensate you for your participation in this little Q&A ordeal.

Next week we’re going to get some prizes up in this piece. Not just dusty, useless crap found lying around my office, either. I’m talking DVDs, people. Good stuff. And the best part? I get to award them however I want, according to whatever criteria I decide on, and my decisions shall be final and accountable to no one.

OK, so maybe that last part only pleases me, but the takeaway here is that, as of next week, being included in the TMB may actually be worth something. I’ll have more details on my Twitter as we get closer, but for now we turn our focus to this week’s batch of questions, for which no one received a single thing. Enjoy.

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@benfowlkesMMA Short of hitting him with a brick, how does anyone in the HW division stop Cain? #TMB

Hitting him with a brick actually isn’t a terrible idea. Just make you sure you hit him hard enough. If you happen to be facing Cain Velasquez in a state where the local commission frowns on things like brick-toting (in other words, somewhere other than Texas), it seems to me that your best chance to beat him is to force him to fight at distance. As we saw in his first fight with Junior dos Santos and even in his decision win over Cheick Kongo, every moment Velasquez spends on the outside – that is, out of clinch range but in punching range – is a moment he’s vulnerable. Trouble is, he seems to realize that, so he doesn’t hang out in that danger zone very often. Finding a way to make him, that’s the tough part.

@benfowlkesMMA#TMB Machida a sizable favorite at -300. Isn’t there a better chance he spends majority of fight on back eating donkey Kongs?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this Lyoto Machida fellow can be pretty tough to take down. He just came off a fight with former NCAA national champion Phil Davis, who got the decision victory but went two for 10 in the takedown department, and couldn’t do a whole lot once he did get Machida down. That’s not to say Machida won’t have his hands full against Mark Munoz, who is never more than one or two Donkey Kongs from victory. What I wonder is, after the sting of his loss to Davis, will Machida be tempted to abandon his patient, “elusive” style in favor of something that more judges will recognize as fighting? Because, honestly, I could see how that could be an exciting development or a very, very bad one for Machida.

@benfowlkesMMA with more & more skillful women fighters do you see a dominant run by Ronda or the belt changing hands like LHW prior 2 Bones

The biggest threat to the continued reign of Ronda Rousey is her movie career. As she announced earlier this month, once she’s done filming “The Expendables 3″ (side note: ugh, really? we need three of those movies?), she’ll then fly to Atlanta to film “Fast & Furious 7″ (uggggghhh), before heading back to L.A. to squeeze in a six-week training camp before defending her title against Miesha Tate, who is presumably not splitting her time between the gym and some terrible “Tank Girl” remake. I’m not saying Rousey can’t be both a fighter and an actor. I’m just saying that, when others have tried it, it hasn’t always worked out so well.

@benfowlkesMMA will the women’s division survive in the ufc without Rousey?

I sure hope so. Not just because I enjoy watching the women’s fights, but also because it would be a PR disaster for the UFC if it discontinued its women’s MMA experiment if/when Rousey goes full Gina Carano on us and runs off to Hollywood for good. That’s basically telling the other female fighters, “Yeah, we were only interested in the one pretty blonde girl,” which in turn is like telling the world that you never cared about the sports aspect of women’s MMA at all. That would be bad. That would be like women’s tennis folding up shop the second it ran low on statuesque Russian beauties. It’d be like canceling the heavyweight division after Brock Lesnar left. You can’t do it and still retain your credibility. For that and other reasons, I really, really hope the UFC doesn’t try it, even if Rousey lands that role as the saucy sidekick in “Tango & Cash II.”

@benfowlkesMMA Is there evidence of as much brain damage from MMA as football?

No, but probably only because it hasn’t been around as long. Mike Webster, the first former NFL player to be diagnosed with CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), played from 1974 to 1990, and it wasn’t until the autopsy following his death in 2002 that the full extent of his brain trauma was discovered. That’s nearly 30 years from the time he started his career as a professional to when doctors fully realized what that career had done to his brain. The UFC will be celebrating its 20th birthday next month, so how can we know yet whether its fighters will be better or worse off than NFL players as they age? My guess is that football, where you’re smashing heads every weekend for roughly half the year (not to mention practice), is probably more damaging to your brain than MMA over the long run, but neither is likely all that great for your health. Both involve being hit in the head repeatedly, even if some get hit in the head more than others. Even if MMA fighters were half as likely as football players to develop CTE, that’d still be quite a few of our former greats doomed to a depressing downward spiral after hanging up the gloves. Even worse, MMA fighters don’t have a union or a pension fund to help them out in their later years, and the UFC only has so many of those do-nothing jobs to hand out.

So what are we supposed to do with that as fans? Do we stop watching out of disgust? Do we tell ourselves that it’s fine because, hey, they knew what they were getting into? I honestly don’t know. I don’t think the answer is to eradicate every dangerous activity that humans participate in. I also don’t think the answer is to ignore the risks or the consequences and leave those with broken bodies and brains to take care of themselves once they cease to entertain us.

@benfowlkesMMA does tj grant deserve immediate title shot upon return or does he have to get another win

Deserve is a funny word when it comes to UFC title shots. It doesn’t really mean anything. As we’ve seen many times in the very recent past, the UFC is more inclined to grant title shots to the contenders it can sell. T.J. Grant might have fit that description after knocking out Gray Maynard, but time goes by and the memory of that triumph becomes hazy. Josh Thomson headkicking Nate Diaz? That’s fresher in our minds. Gilbert Melendez throttling Diego Sanchez? That’s fresher still. The longer he sits out, the more chances it gives other lightweights to jump ahead of him in line. He hasn’t lost, so you can’t say that he doesn’t still “deserve” the same prize he earned back in May. You also can’t say he’s likely to get it.

@benfowlkesMMA Many people are calling the Melendez/Sanchez fight the FOTY. Do you agree or disagree and why?? #tmb

It was a hell of a fight, but I can’t call it the best of year. It wasn’t competitive enough. Aside from briefly taking Melendez’s back in the first round and dropping him in the third, Sanchez didn’t do much offensively. He just got beat up, and didn’t seem to mind all that much. That has a certain appeal, but it’s nothing like the fight that Jon Jones and Alexander Gustafsson put on. That was one where each man had his moments and neither had to settle for being a walking punching bag. By the end, you really weren’t sure who would get the decision. That, to me, is a great fight. Melendez-Sanchez? That was more a display of one man’s skill and the other man’s guts.

@benfowlkesMMA With countless events planned for Brazil next year, do you think brazilian fighters should worry less about being cut? #TMB

Not necessarily. One of the things the UFC likes about Brazil is not just that there are lots of MMA fans, but also lots of MMA fighters. If one isn’t working out, there are plenty more where he came from.

@benfowlkesMMA Should Refs end fights when fighters are unable to defend themselves not bc they’re KO’d but are outclassed? re:Cain/JDS #TMB

That’s a question worth asking, but I’m not sure it’s the ref we should count on to stop a fight when he thinks one guy is simply way better than the other. Refs have a lot to worry about as it is, and not all of them do a great job of managing those concerns. Plus, historically this hasn’t been the same kind of problem in MMA that it has in boxing. With smaller gloves, no knockdown rule, and more ways to end a fight, fighters who outclass their opponents usually finish them fairly quickly. It’s when you get fighters who are tough enough to take the punishment and skilled enough to stay just barely in the fight that you have a recipe for real trouble.

So who should step in and do something once it’s clear that we’re headed for more senseless violence with little hope of a turnaround? I’d say that’s the corner’s job. They know their fighter, what he’s capable of, and what he’s not. They’re also the ones who are supposed to care about him. They should be able to quit for him when they know he can’t or won’t.

@benfowlkesMMA Dana White was saying the have too many fighters. When will we see a mass cut of fighters and who should go? I think WW’s

First of all, let’s not forget how the UFC ended up with too many fighters. UFC president Dana White likes to talk about his bloated roster like it’s the result of a natural disaster, but the fact is that he did this. He added weight classes. He told whole casts of “The Ultimate Fighter” hopefuls that they’d all get a shot. He hired too many people, and now wants to act like those people have been somehow forced on him. Sorry, but that’s not how it works.

That said, if the UFC feels like it has to cut fighters, I wouldn’t advocate taking the axe to one division ahead of all others. Yes, the UFC has plenty of welterweights, but that’s because there are so many good ones. Same with lightweight. If the UFC wants to clear space, maybe it shouldn’t keep adding TUF contestants who didn’t make the cut on the reality show. But then, those guys fight cheap. It’s the Yushin Okamis of the world who cost.

@benfowlkesMMA Sonnen/Silva on TUF Brazil – why wouldn’t the UFC put them on the regular TUF? Does the pairing get you interested?

I’d describe my interest in a Chael Sonnen vs. Wanderlei Silva fight as limited. I don’t think it’ll be terribly competitive, and the rivalry seems contrived and not all that relevant to any divisional hierarchy, but fine, I’d watch it if it was on TV. What I’m far less interested in is seeing them engage in a series of nose-to-nose mumbling matches for weeks on end. You want to make that fight? Cool, go ahead and make it. But asking us to sit through a full season of reality TV first is a long climb for a short slide. Just do the fight already. There’s no need to have Sonnen antagonize the nation of Brazil any further.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie.com and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.com.

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